HOLLYWOOD — Three minutes into the second quarter of a nonleague game last week, Hollywood High’s coach called time, gathered five teenagers who between them had started fewer than a dozen varsity games, and told them, more or less, to slow down and breathe.
“That’s the whole season in one huddle,” said Dominic Vasquez, in his sixth year running the boys’ program. “We are young, we are fast, and we are in a hurry to make every mistake at once. My job is to get them to make them one at a time.”
The Sheiks lost that game, to a visiting private school called Bishop Carrow, by fourteen. They also cut a nineteen-point deficit to six in the third quarter before their legs and their inexperience caught up with them, which is the sort of thing Vasquez has learned to count as progress in December.
Four sophomores are in the rotation, an unusually green group forced onto the floor by graduation and a couple of transfers who left over the summer. The roster’s lone senior of consequence, guard Terrence Ilodigwe, has taken on the job of steadying them, a role he says he did not expect and has come to enjoy.
“Last year I could just play,” Ilodigwe said. “This year I’m playing and coaching and yelling and picking guys up off the floor. I go home tired in a different way. But when a young guy hits a shot he was scared to take a week ago, that’s mine too, a little.”
The early schedule has been unkind by design. Vasquez front-loaded the nonleague slate with bigger, older teams, on the theory that a young group is better off getting beaten in November and December, when it does not count, than in February, when it does.
The results have been what he expected: a couple of wins over teams as raw as his own, several double-digit losses to teams that are not. What he watches instead is whether the same mistake shows up two weeks running. Lately, he said, it mostly does not.
League play opens in early January, and the Sheiks are not expected to contend for much. Vasquez does not pretend otherwise. He talks instead about the sophomores being juniors next year, about a freshman team that went undefeated, about the gym filling up again the way it did a few winters back before the program thinned out.
For now the wins are small and internal. The team is holding the ball for a full possession without a panicked turnover. It is getting back on defense. It is, Ilodigwe said, starting to look like a team instead of five kids in the same jersey.
“Ask me in two years how good they are,” Vasquez said, watching his sophomores run a drill they had botched a month earlier and now ran clean. “I’ll be bragging. Right now I’m teaching.”